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PMSat: Optimizing Passive Metasurface for Low Earth Orbit Satellite Communication

Published: 02 October 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite communication is essential for wireless communication. While manufacturing and launching LEO satellites have become efficient and cost-effective, ground stations remain expensive due to complex designs for handling severe path losses and precise beam tracking. Hence, it is important to develop low cost and high-performance ground stations for widespread adoption of LEO satellite communication. Towards realizing this goal, we design a passive metasurface-enhanced LEO ground station system, named PMSat, combining metasurface's fine-grained beamforming capability with a small-size phased array's adaptive steering and focusing. For uplink, we jointly optimize the phase array codebook and uplink metasurface phase profile, and realize electronic steering by switching the codeword. We further jointly optimize the downlink metasurface phase profile to improve the focusing performance and enhance the received signal strength (RSS) over a wide range of incident angles. Our PMSat prototype consists of a single passive metasurface with 21 × 21 elements for uplink and 22 × 22 for downlink, along with 1 × 4 receiving and 1 × 4 transmitting phased array antennas. The effectiveness of our proposed PMSat is validated through extensive experiments, and results demonstrate that the optimized metasurface improves the SNR by 8.32 dB and 16.57 dB for uplink and downlink, respectively.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ACM MobiCom '23: Proceedings of the 29th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking
October 2023
1605 pages
ISBN:9781450399906
DOI:10.1145/3570361
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 02 October 2023

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Author Tags

  1. LEO satellite communication
  2. passive metasurface
  3. phased array antennas

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View all
  • (2025)Passive Metasurface-Based Low Earth Orbit Ground Station DesignTsinghua Science and Technology10.26599/TST.2023.901015730:1(148-160)Online publication date: Feb-2025
  • (2025)SpaceRTC: Unleashing the Low-Latency Potential of Mega-Constellations for Wide-Area Real-Time CommunicationsIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2024.347033024:2(642-661)Online publication date: Feb-2025
  • (2024)SurfOS: Towards an Operating System for Programmable Radio EnvironmentsProceedings of the 23rd ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks10.1145/3696348.3696861(132-141)Online publication date: 18-Nov-2024
  • (2024)GPMS: Enabling Indoor GNSS Positioning using Passive MetasurfacesProceedings of the 30th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking10.1145/3636534.3690702(1424-1438)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2024
  • (2024)MicroSurf: Guiding Energy Distribution inside Microwave Oven with MetasurfacesProceedings of the 30th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking10.1145/3636534.3690697(1346-1360)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2024

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